


in this moment we are more powerful than we will ever be again

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Getting Together, M/M, atsumu develops a stress-walking habit, black jackal 4 dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23408404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: [Image description: Two stupid fucks falling down the side of a waterfall.]
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Comments: 11
Kudos: 224
Collections: Valentine's Day Lockers 2020





	in this moment we are more powerful than we will ever be again

**Author's Note:**

> for joey, with love

_you know who you are not  
but that is little new. native  
of nowhere,- you'll stay a spell, return,  
write, grow still.  
_

By the time Hinata Shouyou joins the Black Jackals, Bokuto has already established himself as the resident immortal and Sakusa has established himself as the guy with the big sword. It follows naturally that Shouyou will have to eke out a place for himself that doesn’t involve either of the above, though no one has any ideas. They’re not really idea people, after all. They’re explorers.

Within the first five days Atsumu develops a stress-walking habit because he wants Shouyou to stay, won’t admit it, and is too self-conscious to offer help. Sakusa teaches Shouyou, begrudgingly, how to wield a weapon better in case they ever need a replacement for the guy with the big sword. Bokuto is put in charge of the map and he reads it wrong the way he does every time he’s put in charge of the map. Whereas the initial plan had been to make a six-day journey, they end up spending two weeks in the Weeping Forest, being dunked on by rain and hail and tiny tree sprites.

Apparently two weeks is enough. They emerge into the Valley of Dateko one morning, soggy and triumphant. As the sky yawns above them, Shouyou, who had been busy swinging his sword around and discussing the pros and cons of immortality with Bokuto, drops neatly to the ground.

Atsumu looks at Sakusa. Sakusa looks at Bokuto. Bokuto looks back at Atsumu but Atsumu won’t meet his eyes. Asshole. Bokuto is forced to open his mouth. He concludes that they will have to do something.

But first:

“What the fuck,” says Atsumu, brushing his wet bangs out of his eyes.

“He’s a bird?”

  
::

  
Shouyou is not a bird. He is a shapeshifter. Unfortunately this fact sails over the Black Jackals’ heads because they are not idea people but rather explorers. They are coastal towns and long treks through the mountains and fire-breathing dragons perched atop deep blue cliffs. They are eager and restless on principle. What they know of the world is carved into their bodies in strokes of blood and scar-tissue, and by extension, their souls.

That being said, Shouyou successfully establishes himself as the resident shapeshifter and with that their party expands, officially, to number four. Shouyou the crow is small and fast. His feathers have a cerulean, almost-aquamarine sheen to them when looked at from an angle and it reminds Atsumu distantly of labradorites. He used to collect labradorites as a kid. They had a tendency to manifest in unexpected places around the village he grew up in and he would fish them out of rivers and ravines. It felt as though the earth were offering up parts of its own body. Chipped elbows and old teeth, histories.

Several months after Shouyou joins the party, they decide to make a trip to the waterfall. There is only one waterfall in this region, shared amongst the neighboring kingdoms. It is a terrifying and lovely thing with a drop that goes on for several hundred miles, and can only be reached via various expensive modes of aerial transportation. Atsumu pulls Shouyou out of their tent while Bokuto and Sakusa have their bimonthly argument about whether it is The Waterfall or the waterfall, and explains this to him.

“I know,” Shouyou says brightly. He squeezes Atsumu’s hand and Atsumu realizes that he has forgotten to let it go. Feeling that telltale heat beginning to spread across his face, he moves to release Shouyou’s hand.

“I know,” Shouyou repeats. He covers the back of Atsumu’s hand with his own and smiles at him. The fire Sakusa had begrudgingly built earlier is still burning. It spills across Shouyou’s cheeks and stops, alarmed and already half-enamored, at his teeth.

  
::

  
A week later they reach the pinnacle of The Waterfall, as narrated by Bokuto, who is standing on their flying lizard and peering into the space behind The Waterfall like he thinks he will find something there. After a prolonged moment of concentration, he lets out a squawk. Atsumu wonders if he’s finally seen God.

A thin ledge juts out of the rock-face, cutting cleanly behind the thundering sheet of water beside it. Bokuto has not seen God. He has seen God’s fire escape exit.

“I’m going into the waterfall,” declares Atsumu, who is not thinking.

“You are not going into the waterfall,” says Sakusa, who is. He hefts his broadsword off his shoulder and settles it in his lap. He will not be going into any waterfalls. He is going to stay with the flying lizard. The lizard’s name is Haiji and he is three hundred years old.

“I mean,” says Shouyou. Atsumu leaps off the lizard and presses himself flat against the rock face. Bokuto is harassing Sakusa with an elaborate theory about the people he now believes reside inside the waterfall that is God’s fire escape exit. Haiji grunts in agreement.

Atsumu turns to look back up at Shouyou, who is hovering on the edge of Haiji’s scaly back. He looks ready to run, though Atsumu’s not sure in which direction. He revels, momentarily, in the fact that he is the reason for it. Even if it is his recklessness speaking. Even if it’s selfish curiosity.

“You coming?”

A flicker of hesitation. Sakusa makes a half-hearted grab at Shouyou’s ankle.

Atsumu holds out a hand. Shouyou takes it.

  
::

  
Image description (courtesy of Sakusa Kiyoomi): two stupid fucks falling down the side of a waterfall.

  
::

  
Apparently, Osamu knew from the age of fourteen-and-five-days that he wanted to open an inn. Atsumu, on the other hand, led a turbulent life of rock-collecting and pigeon-stealing until a party of explorers stopped over in their village, and lost a member to some foot fungus or another. Intrigued by the tall tales they had flaunted at the bar each evening, Atsumu begged them to take him along. They were reluctant. He was seventeen-and-eighty-days old and could barely lift the lightest sword they had. He was also human.

They agreed eventually on the sole condition that they would not be held responsible for any injury or death. His parents were horrified; Osamu fell off his chair with laughter. He commented, accurately, that Atsumu was to them a small dog or a baby that had been regretfully shoved into their hands. They would do the bare minimum to ensure his survival, and nothing more.

Nonetheless, Atsumu was thrilled. All his life he had felt a strange itch located somewhere between his left elbow and his sternum. As he followed them from sky-scraped ceilings to deep indigo valleys, he found, for the first time in his life, that it had vanished. He spent six months with the party. In the process he learned how to start a campfire and pitch a tent and slay a fire-breathing dragon. By the time he left, and he did eventually, he was more than capable of lifting their heaviest sword and slinging it across his shoulder.

For a while after that he traveled alone. He skirted the edge of civil wars and witnessed the sprawling forestry of Seijou, the highrises of Karasuno. That familiar old ache was sated by the cyclical movement of his legs and the jagged path he cut through the underbelly of the universe. But in its place, a new kind of wanting appeared.

Later he would seek out ways to quell this sensation. He would join every exploration party that caught his eye and leave just as quickly. He consulted doctors and spiritualists and had his fate divined by slight, red-eyed girls in market alleys.

It occurred to him after storming away from his last party, five years after first leaving his village, that he was lonely. He had left his traveling pack at their campsite and his gloves inside of it; his hands were cold. The more he saw, the bigger his world grew. Consequently, the cavity of his heart could do nothing but follow, yearning and yearning with growing intensity, while he sought out the predestined place where he would lay his body to rest.

  
::

  
“—IE.”

“HUH?”

“I SAID DO YOU WANT TO DIE.”

“NO?”

"THEN LISTEN TO ME.”

  
::

  
Still falling at a rate of eighty-five miles per hour, Shouyou drags Atsumu violently towards him and scrapes his teeth along the back of Atsumu’s hand. He spits out unfamiliar sounds and Atsumu spits them back at him. Blood, magic, blood. There’s the dull sting of pain and a sliver of surprise even as they fall faster and faster towards the ground. Atsumu’s vision goes black. Somewhere in the back of his mind he has the distinct awareness that his heart is being carved out of his body.

Then the world returns to him, and it stops.

Shouyou the boy is small and fast and good at getting into narrow spaces, like tree trunks or animal burrows. He is a shapeshifter from a family with a long tradition of defying all known laws of gravity. He is older than he looks, though he hides it well.

Shouyou the crow is supposed to be all of these things with an emphasis on small and fast and magical. As he lifts Atsumu onto his broad, feathery back and swoops towards the heavens, Atsumu is forced to re-evaluate his understanding of the universe.

“What the fuck,” he says.

“You’re stuck with me now,” Shouyou says, tittering. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind but,” Atsumu sticks his face in his plumage. He breathes in magic and the smell of roasted chestnuts. “What the fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah no. You’re explaining all of this to me later.”

“Sure, Atsumu-san. Sure.”

  
::

  
By the time Hinata Shouyou joined the Black Jackals, Bokuto had already established himself as the resident immortal and Sakusa had established himself as the guy with the big sword, but no one told him what Atsumu was supposed to be because there was, in effect, nothing to say. Atsumu had been the first member of this party. That was what mattered most.

Atsumu is possessed with ambition that rivals the gods. Bokuto bore witness to this once, standing in the hallway of his hollowed-out home as its owl-eyes gazed out into the gray forest behind. Sakusa acknowledged it when Atsumu lifted his broadsword with one arm and flung it at a tree and missed by half a mile.

Hinata Shouyou dives off a waterfall with him and, seconds before they hit the ground, gives him his soul.

“So, yeah, that’s a familiar contract,” Shouyou concludes. They’re sitting by the dying campfire again. Inside the tent Bokuto and Sakusa are having their bimonthly argument about whether salamanders should be allowed to breathe fire or be chained to a brick wall as repentance for their sins. They would have stayed at an inn in the city, but it didn’t pass Sakusa’s hygiene check because the inn owners kept a pair of pet salamanders, so they set up camp on the edge of it instead. Frankly speaking, Atsumu thinks it looks nicer from afar.

“I see,” he says. He is not really seeing, but he feels like he has to say something to the boy who saved his life when he tried to walk behind a waterfall, and accidentally knocked himself off the edge of it instead. This boy followed him down the waterfall. This boy brought him back up. His karmic energy has gone off the charts; God is probably getting ready to push him out of his fire escape exit.

Shouyou looks up at him from beneath his lashes, blinking slowly. “You’re frowning,” he says. “Why?”

Atsumu has qualms about familiars. He may not be an idea person but he is, above all else, a feelings person. He has feelings about this. He tells Shouyou as much.

“It doesn’t have to be weird, you know,” Shouyou says. He laughs breezily, waves a hand through the air. “My magic gets a boost, you get free aerial transport. If you try to jump off the side of a waterfall again I turn into a big badass crow and fetch you out of the sky.” He bumps their shoulders together, all five-foot-eight of him blood-warm and familiar. “We get to stay as friends.”

“Or, if you’d prefer.” He leans forward, reaching thoughtfully for the side of Atsumu’s face.

Atsumu doesn’t move. He doesn’t look away. He watches the flames dance up the side of Shouyou’s face and wonders how his stress-walking habit went away at all when this boy always looks this beautiful.

He used to collect labradorites. That sacrosanct blood of the earth, those mottled flashes of color. He used to dream of leaving his humanity behind.

“If I’d prefer?” he asks helplessly.

Shouyou smiles like the heart-side of a knife.

“Then we can be something else.”

  
::

  
With that in mind, perhaps they shall conquer the universe.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs)
> 
> [[this](https://www.google.com/search?q=labradorite&client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=ALeKk005euZPoX6ncfNHgL_GUNCPuhGvIw:1585650124529&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiF9KODv8ToAhVZbysKHcehDY4Q_AUoAXoECBoQAw&biw=1536&bih=750) is a labradorite. i own 2 small ones. they are delicious]  
> [quote at the start is from homage to phillis wheatley]  
> this au is joey's. the whole thing. i have been following their tweets about it and so was inspired but also not entirely present in the physical realm so i altered some details with my shitty writer's license. that being said, if you'd like to see their lovely art and more of this au visually represented, please check out their twitter @kyoujurouu  
> anyway i have been excited about this au since like 1994 (a/n: february) so i am very happy that i am finally able to do something with it. i would like to return at some point but there are Many Things i want to write so really we will see where the winds take us. amidst the chaos of armageddon etc i hope all of you are taking care of yourselves and sleeping. please sleep. i keep not sleeping. it's fucking me up.  
> thank you for reading. if you liked it please feel free to leave kudos or comments, i love hearing from you guys. you're all absolute darlings. i'll see you when i see you
> 
> have a good one


End file.
